Category: Random

God, I’m really popular today for some reason. Everyone’s being really nice to me. I wonder what that’s about. Next up we have a site review from 2xy.org=f(ab)! :: adored. My favourite (surreal) line goes as follows: “I mean, if I were in his shoes, I’d be extremely wary of unbidden strangers who lavish me with thick praise. You can’t be too careful on the Internet these days, especially if you’re as popular as Tom Coates.” What a strange world it is in which we live. Nevertheless consider me astonishingly flattered. And yes, I’m afraid I will link to anyone who says really nice things about me. I don’t care if that’s whoredom or not.

It’s a bit of a Tom-love-in today. Thanks to Mark Kevin Hall from Hidden City for the present and saying all that nice stuff about me.

Thank you Kerry and Sean:
This detail of a wonderful card sent to me by two of my LA friends is perhaps less … spicy … than the original, but still demonstrates their amazing graphic design skill and sense of humour. Thanks guys!

Today on Barbelith: Old is the new young – “Being a glimpse – inexcusably yet unapologetically flippant – into the world of a wannabe Old Git.”

So I’ve been watching Ultraviolet on DVD today in between spats of job-finding. And I’ve been loving it. And then I hit the fourth episode – one on paedophilia. And it happened again – as I watched it I became gradually more concerned about where the line was being drawn between gay people and paedophiles. Firstly, it was male-male paedophilia, which always alarms me, since sexual abuse is most often male-female and within families. Secondly, two men walking around in a park is used as an indication that it might be an area attended by paedophiles – as opposed to a cruising ground for a particular kind of exhibitionist or closeted poof. Thirdly, one of the paedophiles is shown disposing of an adult gay porn mag – adult male on male as well. Finally, the two main paedophiles are camp mincers – lip pursing bitches with high voices and limp wrists – semiotic indicators of gay men. A structuralist critic would no doubt have a lot to say about the grouping together of ‘unattractive’ and ‘unaccepted’ sexualities – I just saw a clumsy and insulting episode that was (possibly unintentionally) homophobic. It’s discoloured my whole view of the series.

A brief theory of Fraggle Rock: “Doozers were capitalist over-consumption. Fraggles were the utopian hippies who enjoyed life at their expense. The dog was existential terror. Humans were dark, inscrutable Gods.”

So I run a big message board, right? And there’s a job for a big Producer job involving running message boards, right? And I think I could do it pretty well, right? But I’m concerned that people in the web industry, more often than not, view extra-curricular web work as a hindrance rather than a boon to employment. When I went for a job a couple of years ago at a web publishing company, I said that I ran several successful personal websites. And the woman who interviewed me said “you won’t be able to build them while you are at work, you know”. And I kind of looked at her and said, after a pause, “I know”. Which kind of meant, “Duh”. So the question is, “IS BARBELITH A POSITIVE THING TO PUT ON A CV OR NOT?”

For those of you who might have got concerned, I do not have a gun, nor did I view my last BBC job interview as the end of the known world: thanks for caring though…

Interesting article on Big Brother in the Guardian [link] includes this paragraph, “The E4 transmission is on a 10-minute delay in order to prevent swear words and libels reaching daytime viewers. On an average day, Andrew Newman, director of programmes on E4, estimates that the housemates say “fuck” at least 1,300 times, “slightly less now that Bubble has been evicted”. On several occasions they’ve had to cut the volume when the housemates didn’t so much speculate as know that a major Hollywood actor is gay.”

Two sites that I worked on (HTML-building) while getting fill-in work at Arehaus a couple of months ago have now launched: eB-21 and cabe.org.uk. Which means I can finally link to this page and ask the very serious question – is Robert Bargery the hottest bitch you have seen in your life, or what?